The early bird deadline for 
The 2025 Freelance Fellowship Recipients
The historic drought is making average residents think twice every time they turn on the tap, despite the weekend rain. But there is nothing average about the way Californians consume water: A little-known state database that measures water use in every community shows huge — sometimes shocking — differences between California’s water sippers and guzzlers.
Read MoreSpills releasing PCE, the cancer-causing chemical used in dry cleaning and metal degreasing, have produced at least 86 underground plumes across Colorado that are poisoning soil and water and fouling air inside buildings. Cleaning up this chemical is a nightmare — a lesson in the limits of repairing environmental harm. The best that Colorado health…
Read MoreHeroin, long a scourge of inner cities, has infiltrated suburbia and rural towns and is claiming the lives of an increasingly younger, middle-class and white male clientele at an alarming rate. But new statistics compiled for the Democrat and Chronicle by the office, which investigates suspected drug-related deaths across the region, show that more often than not…
Read MoreLightning Talks are back for CAR 2014 in Baltimore! Got an idea for a talk? Submit it here: http://ire.aronpilhofer.com/ Lightning Talks are 5-minute presentations on topics wide and varied. If you’d like to submit a talk, please use the form linked above. We ask that only folks who are attending NICAR vote on the submissions, and we’ll hear…
Read MoreIf a judge agrees with a court fact-finder, Gannett New Jersey could be getting $542,000 in legal fees stemming from a public records lawsuit. Gannett filed suit in 2009 after several newspapers asked for municipal payroll records in an electronic format, not PDFs. In August 2012 the company won the “precedent-setting case.” As for the…
Read MoreWhen I was a reporter at a daily newspaper in Virginia, few things frustrated me more than slow responses to Freedom of Information Act requests. I’d put in my request and wait the allotted response time only to receive a handful of excuses. Sometimes, after weeks of nagging, I’d get the documents. Other times my…
Read MoreLess than two dozen of Virginia’s roughly 300 law enforcement agencies filed a required drug destruction report to the state’s Board of Pharmacy in 2012, according to a report by Richmond, Va. television station WRIC. “Since the ABC 8 News investigation first aired in February 2013, the number of law enforcement agencies complying with the…
Read MoreOf the 18 deaths in law enforcement custody from 2008 through 2012 in Milwaukee County, 12 were classified as suicide or natural. Officials at every level have used those rulings to absolve themselves of responsibility for prisoners’ deaths, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found. In many cases, officials did not evaluate all of the circumstances…
Read MoreA Navy jury last month found that a master diver failed to make sure proper safety procedures were followed during a training exercise that left two men dead. The Pilot pieced together an account of the dive using court testimony, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with unit members, witnesses and…
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